Addison

Addison is the transferred use of a Scottish patronymic surname meaning “son of Addie” – Addie being a medieval Scottish Lowlands nickname for Adam. So Addison basically means “son of Adam”. Adam is, of course, a name borne from the Bible as the first man God created. It comes from the Hebrew “adamah” meaning “ground, earth” or more literally, “(the one formed from the) ground”. Apropos, “dust from the ground” was the essential ingredient of God’s creation. Adam is also the generic term for “Man” as told in Genesis 5:2. Therefore, Addison means “son of the ground” or “son of man”. Only in recent years (since the 1990s) has Addison seen success as a given name (primarily female) and its usage is mainly restricted to the United States, Canada and Australia. Addison actually started out in the United States as a masculine personal name, but eventually American parents of baby girls responded to this androgynous-sounding surname and started bestowing it upon their daughters in 1994. It essentially coincided with the popularity of Madison (a similar sounding name used heavily in America). The more popular Addison became for girls, the less popular it was for boys. It finally fell off the male charts in 2009 so now the name is considered almost exclusively female.